It’s up to us.

What happens after a particular public engagement event ends?

Experienced practitioners spend much time understanding the context of of deliberation — interests, demographics, language sensitivities, and objective framing of the issues — and they bring this awareness and much else “into the room” to ensure that “collective voice” reasonably reflects every participant.

But how well and how often is that collective voice heard outside the room, as the wider process continues? Public engagement is, generally, one milestone, and not the final one, in a longer process that may include a council vote, a commission hearing, an executive signature or veto, a referendum, or political maneuvering.

What would it take to ensure “the room”‘s collective voice, developed so carefully, continues to be heard?

Lessons from the House

The US Capitol, just up the street from where I live and work, provides us with some suggestions. Consider a legislative measure that originates in the US House of Representatives. Savvy congresswomen and -men will, in shaping the legislation, consider what it will take for the bill to be passed by the US Senate and then signed by the President.

The House may take a more extreme position in order to gain bargaining leverage. It may package together seemingly unrelated measures in a single Bill to force Senate and Presidential approval, e.g. by adding “widows and orphans funding” to a controversial measure, to raise the cost to a Senator who might otherwise vote against the measure or the President considering a veto.

In addition to negotiation tactics, the House has structural means to ensure that its collective voice is heard: if the Senate modifies a bill, the House must pass those modifications before the final bill goes to the President. Further, the House — and, similarly, the Senate — has influence even after the bill has passed into law. It can affect implementation by adding or withholding funding and by holding hearings and of course, ultimately, by passing new legislation.

Three suggestions for public engagement practitioners

There are at least three ways in which an awareness of and then what? can inform public engagement.

Be clear.

Practitioners ought to explore the realities of the wider context: What comes after the public engagement process and how does that affect the likelihood that the “collective voice of the room” will be heard? And the results of these explorations should be shared with participants.

Be strategic.

Practitioners and participants should think more strategically about how the collective voice is expressed. Just as the House may shape a bill not just to reflect its collective voice but also to strengthen the hand of its negotiators in their discussions with the Senate and with the President, we should think more carefully about who might speak and act against the collective voice “outside” the room and how that might be countered.

Transform the broader context.

What if practitioners included a follow-up survey to be taken of all participants, one year after public engagement has ended, to assess participants’ opinions of whether their collective voice was heeded as the larger process progressed? What if a public engagement process included a review of past processes and what happened with their recommendations, rather than starting in a kind of vacuum? What other measures could we recommend to government officials and to the public to “strengthen the hand” of public engagement?

End Notes

Of course, there are already wise public engagement practitioners who show how some of these suggestions can be addressed in practice.

IAP2’s spectrum of participation (Inform -> Consult -> Involve -> Collaborate -> Empower) allows practitioners, government, and the public to locate a particular process in a wider context and be clear about how much or how little impact participants should expect to have.

AmericaSpeaks’s 21st Century Town Hall planning always included careful thinking about “linking to decision makers” — one strategy to give the collective voice more impact. And the scope and spectacle of larger town halls was in part intended to transform the context by giving the event and its results more impact politically.

(I acknowledge that the public currently disapproves of the House and, indeed the Senate and the President. But the Constitutional structures and legislative strategies touched on above have been in place for more than a century and long pre-date current dissatisfactions.)

Politicos object to public engagement

Last week, in an email thread [parts 11>, 2, 3], a group of Dialogue and Deliberation practitioners and friends explored some of the barriers they have encountered in attempting to provide public engagement services to government agencies. Among them:

POWER

Officials resist giving up power, in the case at hand, and more generally – if, say, the public discovered that much could be accomplished without the mediation of politicos.

EXPERTISE

Officials fear that citizens lack the expertise officials take to be the key if not the only ingredient in sound policy making.

ELECTIONS

As one person wrote “Officials, directly or indirectly, must still respond to the whole body of voters at election time. If they base their decisions on a small, arguably unrepresentative set of ‘advisers,’ that may not set well with voters.”

The discussion concluded with a thumping affirmation of the power and effectiveness of public engagement, a lament — “We get little chance to do what we do magnificently to any substantive degree” thus “On the average everything in public engagement is getting worse and worse”– and a prophetic call for action:”What can we do about these things?”

I agree – don’t blame the practitioners, the people who put expertise, sensitvity, and experience into the design and implementation of processes that can work so well for participants.

Fine, but these obstacles remain. What to do?

Why? Let’s find out

Insist that the people responsible for business development — for building the bridges between practitioners and government officials — invest similar expertise, sensitivy, and experience into understanding and then addressing the concerns of those officials.

They can begin by finding the legitimate core of each of the issues raised above.

POWER – A WAY TO GET THINGS DONE

The public holds an elected leader accountable for a wide range of circumstances, many of which are outside of her control, e.g. winter storms, the economic policies of her predecessor, the actions of other jurisdictions. Reducing her power subjects her and, in turn her constituents, to these forces.

Worse, power is a fleeting thing, an odd amalgam of law, custom, and perception. Ask any President moving toward the middle of his second term about the challenges of staving off the powerlessness of “lame duck” status.

EXPERTISE – ACCOMMODATING THE BROADER CONSTRAINTS

The will of the people must often be reconciled with an array of constraints. Good policy on, for instance, healthcare and health insurance should be consistent with medical science, the psychology of incentives, economics, and demographics, among other disciplines.

Yet it’s unlikely that the public is versed in these matters. Indeed, people often have a weak grasp of key facts on even hotly debated issues. Recently, a late night entertainer showed how the man (and woman) in the street dismisses “Obamacare” as too invasive and expensive, then, seconds later, embraces “the Affordable Care Act” (the very same legislation under its original name) as a more reasonable alternative.

ELECTIONS – MAINTAINING LEGITIMACY

This concern may be illusory. A little digging suggests that voters often look favorably on public engagement. Chicago Alderman Joe Moore is in a stronger position, politically, for his enthusiastic sponsorship of participatory budgeting. Jay Williams, a planner deeply involved in Ohio’s *Youngstown 2010* effort, used his success there as a platform for a successful mayoral campaign.

So, in the narrow, this may be a misperception — either of the concerns of elected officials or a misperception of risks by elected officials.

However, ensuring that public engagement work is legitimate and is perceived to be legitimate is a plausible concern. The number of people involved in a regional public engagement effort are generally smaller, often by one or more orders of magnitude, than the number of voters in a region.

Apply the remedies we already know

Recasting these objections points to some remedies already at hand. As the prophet mentioned above wrote:”We know how to do public engagement better than anyone, ever has known how to do it.” For instance:

POWER – PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT GETS THINGS DONE

In the context of effective public engagement, political officials often gain sigificant “implementation power” by ceding a little decision-making power. There’s a little more discussion at the front-end of a process, but then the bridge gets built, the teachers get hired, or the social injustice is corrected.

As the IAP2 spectrum (PDF) shows, it’s possible to design a public engagement process so that it conforms to external constraints. E.g. we don’t brainstorm to determine whether a bridge is sound from an engineering perspective.

More powerfully, public engagement processes can bring acknowledged constraints into a process by educating participants about them. Issue guides can be designed to bring participants up to speed quickly on matters of law and fact, and interactive games can be designed to take those constraints into account.

Most powerfully, an elected official can in effect turn the problem, constraints and all, over to a public engagement process. E.g., the city manager of Redwood City, CA turned over a water conservation mandate to a panel of residents who strongly opposed the city’s initial solution, telling them that if they could meet the state’s mandates in another way, and come in within budget, Redwood City would act on their alternative. The panel came up with a better plan, which was implemented harmoniously.

ELECTIONS – PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AS A COMPONENT IN LEGITIMATE DECISION-MAKING

In those cases where a politician correctly perceives a conflict between re-election and public engagement, there are concrete ways to proceed .

Comprehensive outreach at the beginning of a public engagement process strengthens its legitimacy, by bringing traditionally underrepresented groups to the table, and more closely mirroring the composition of the body politic.

Incorporating traditional electoral measures at the end of a public engagement process creates even broader legitimacy. E.g. the residents of Owensboro, KY began a regional planning process with an AmericaSpeaks 21st Century Town Meeting to set design goals for a revitalized downtown, and then city and county legislative bodies endorsed the decision by voting for tax increases to fund the plan.

And keep listening

Even as they participate in public engagement processes on a particular issue, public officials are following the will of the people on a much broader set of issues, threading multiple needles dictated by science, law, and history, and, often, worrying about the next election.

Business developers, working in support of public engagement practitioners, must work with public officials to understand this wider context, then translate the resulting requirements so that practitioners can apply their vast skills and experience. Those practitioners have already proved their ability to bridge a vast set of gaps to bring people as constituents into public engagement processes.

Not “Mac or Windows?”; rather “who’s going to help?”

I used to dread when friends or family asked: “Chris, what sort of computer should I buy – laptop or desktop, Macintosh or Windows?” The people who needed me most were the hardest to help – they didn’t know how they’d use a computer, weren’t settled on much of a budget, had very high expectations, but little sense of what it would take for them to put a computer to good use.

But turning the question back on them (“how will you use the computer? do you need to hook it up to a printer or a PDA? how much do you want to spend?”) led to embarassment, not insight.

Finally, I realized that people who asked me a question like this would rely on a friend or family member for troubleshooting, when things went wrong. It was surprising that most of my questioners knew right away, when asked, who that techie would be. Of course, if there were problems, they’d call on Cousin Amy, or Joe from church, or that nice man down at the High Tech Depot.

Bingo.

The next time I got the question I responded with a question that was useful, not annoying: “who’s going to help you with your new computer, and what systems do they know?” A light went on in my friend’s eyes: they knew what to do.

The moral: Those first questions about technology are almost always, really, questions about people.

Thus, for organizations, not “Twitter or Facebook?”; rather “who’s going to make this work?”

Now, if you’re an organization seeking social media strategy and technology advice you’ll need a little more help.

Josh Bernoff and Forrester to the rescue, with a shiny (and useful) acronym: POST.

Consider, in order:

People: “[K]now the capabilities of your audience.”

Objective: “Decide on your objective…. Then figure out how you will measure it.”

Strategy: What processes “will be different after you’re done?”

Technology: Twitter? Wiki? Facebook? Blog? etc. “Once you know your people, objectives, and strategy, then you can decide with confidence.”

For non-profits and government agencies, I’d widen the circle of People: your staff, your management, your donors, and your partners are important, too. Who will need to participate in this new strategy to make it a success? What’s their training? What are they capable and motivated to learn?

And I’d start the search for Objectives and – more importantly- measures by writing the stories you’d like to tell when the initiative is a success.

Say you’re putting a state legislature online in a more friendly and accessible way. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to say, once you were done, that a particular group of constituents that had been out of the loop for years used your new site to track a proposed law that threatened to hurt them and, instead, shaped the legislation to help them?

That gives you a rich picture of what success looks like — reaching new, non-expert audiences, providing early warning, making legislative content and procedures comprehensible — and how you might measure it.

So, those first technology questions are, almost always, really questions about People, Objectives, and Strategy. Technology, in POST and in life, is the last question, not the first one.

Is that all there is?

You’ve landed on a Whitehouse.gov petition on an issue that’s close to your heart, and you’re thrilled that’s it’s finally getting some visibility. Of course, you sign the petition, but then you wonder Who are these people? What else can I do? How can I get plugged in?. In way too many cases, the people who started the petition leave you to your wits, and of course to the Google. It’s like a 3am infomercial without the 800-number. What were they thinking?

My inspiration and goad to buildtools for the White House “We the People” petition site was the story of an activist who had, in effect, lost her work gathering signatures when she failed to reach the necessary threshold after a month of work.

Along the way, I wondered how often petition initiators added links to their petition text, to provide more information to potential signers or to supplement their work on whitehouse.gov by building a community on a site that gave them more control.

“We The People”-scope

To investigate, I’ve built a live, interactive database of petitions currently visible and open for signatures at the White House. How well are petitioneers using WhiteHouse.gov traffic and visibility to build activist communities? The results aren’t pretty.

90% of the time, you’re on your own

Of the 39 petitions open for signatures this morning, only four include links:

None of the links (actually in plain text, since the petition site doesn’t allow hot links) make it easy to plug in to community. The NASA funding campaign website is focussed and includes further calls to action, but does not provide a community forum or a mailing list sign-up. The NESARA-related websites provide a wealth of information and, via Ning, a community. However, I could not see how I might easily connect with other supporters of the linked petition. MoveOn.org is a major activist community, but nothing on its home page references the current tax-related petition.

So, of 39 petitions, only three provide links that would allow a signer to tap into a larger community, discuss the petition, and monitor progress, and even those three links are muddy.

The opportunity

What if, instead, a petition linked to a well-designed landing page that encouraged people to sign up to track the progress of the petition, support the cause via other actions, and connect with fellow activists. It’s a missed opportunity.

Last week, I used a trial run of a new “petition scraping” plugin I’ve developed to see which states most strongly supported the recent White House petition that requested the Administration to rescind the health care reform contraception mandate for Catholic employers.

Today, I can add a second, opposing petition to the analysis. It urged the Administration to “stand strong” on the no cost birth control requirement. From what I’ve seen on the petition site, this is unusual – some petitions garner few signatures, but very few petitions are arranged in pro/con pairs. We can take advantage of this “natural experiment” to compare state responses on either side of the issue. (Signature data for the “Stand strong” petition can be downloaded at the csv link below.)

Nebraska, North Dakota, Kansas Against; DC Engaged

The outliers, highlighted in red in the chart, are the story.

Kansas, North Dakota, and Nebraska – in the bottom right – showed significantly stronger support for the Rescind petition, at 309, 367, and 487 signatures per million, than the national average of 117. In contrast, their support for Stand Strong was fairly close to the national average of 89 per million – they’re well within the “cluster” on the left axis.

Something even more interesting is going on in DC. At 509 signatures per million, it is the standout supporter for Stand Strong. But notice that, at 229 signatures per million, it looks a lot like Kansas, North Dakota, and Nebraska in per capita support for Rescind. (I’d guess that DC’s intensity reflects the pro-contraception response by longterm residents combined with combined with the response from advocacy groups on both sides.)

The animated map shows how signatures flowed from each state, normalized by its population, with the petition “closing” on February 10. Click on the slider to see how each state contributed signatures starting on February 3.Fullscreen

See the previous post in the series for details on the Rescind petition and more information on the mechanics of petitions and signatures at whitehouse.gov.

A note on statistics

Some of the variation of a particular state’s response with respect to the US will be due to chance, rather than a fundamental difference in this state’s political leanings vs the US. For instance, weather patterns or state preoccupation with a sports event might have reduced Mississippi’s engagement; it might generate more signatures per capita on similar petitions at another time.

Statisticians measure how much an indicator departs from the average in standard deviations. The standard deviation captures the variability of a set of numbers. In the case of the petition signatures, if the response of a particular state differed from the US average by less than two standard deviations, e.g. Mississippi, this could occur by chance more than 5% of the time.

The bottom left quadrant contains all the states within two standard deviations of the US average.

The remaining three states and DC are outliers indeed. On the Rescind petition, Kansas’s response is more than two, North Dakota’s almost three, and Nebraska’s more than four standard deviations above the US average. This would occur by chance less than 5%, 0.3%, and 0.007% of the time — i.e., from rarely to never. DC’s response to Stand Strong is 5.7 standard deviations away from the mean, which would occur 0.00001% of the time by chance.

The outliers, in other words, are radically more engaged in these respective petitions than the rest of the country.

Open government often carries a significant risk to activists: organizing efforts may be “locked up” by Federal agencies, even with the best intentions.

The rewards, and risks, of squirreling away

Consider Terra Ziporyn Snider. Last fall, she initiated a petition on the White House website requesting changes in school start times. Then current White House rules required that she gather 5000 signatures within 30 days in order to keep the petition on the site. She and her supporters encountered various technical problems – intermittent site outages, difficulty in signing up new users — and as the deadline approached, with 1575 signatures recorded, Dr. Snider realized that the fruit of her efforts was about to be digitally vanished, per White House rules.

I was taken by the lengths she went to transplant the list of names she had built at the White House to Move-On. Though these signatures had been gathered through her online organizing efforts, and of course were stored on a hard drive somewhere in the whitehouse.gov domain, she had no way to access these data easily. Instead, she printed out the petition and, apparently, retyped the signatures by hand.

Imagine a New England squirrel storing away nuts for next winter in the trunk of a tourist’s car – it’s secure today, tomorrow, and perhaps even next week, but when the snow comes, the car — and the nuts — are in Florida, and the squirrel starves.

Of course, in the case of White House petitions, the potential of reaching a wider audience for your cause and of getting the attention of the Obama administration may make this risk worthwhile.

But, as Dr. Snider found, sometimes the car drives away, and you’ve got to scramble not to be left empty-handed. How could one reduce the risk, particularly for activists who don’t know or don’t have access to sites live Move-On?

A tool for liberating signatures

Her story was my inspiration to build a page scraping toolset that would allow activists to get the benefits of White House web petitions, while reducing the risk.

The toolset for liberating signatures from White House petitions is almost complete. It’s a browser-based javascript plugin that automates signature capture with some shortcuts to reduce loads on the petition server.

As a proof of concept, I set the plugin to work on two recent petitions. The first requests that the Administration rescind regulations mandating that religious institutions provide contraceptive coverage under their employee health insurance plans, even if this is contrary to their religious precepts. The second urges the Administration to “stand strong” in maintaining this mandate.

The mechanics of initiating and signing petitions

Anyone may initiate a petition. Per the rules currently in force, new petitions are visible only to those web visitors who already know the specific petition URL. Once a petition receives its 150th signature, it is listed by the White House in the index of current petitions and can be found by appropriate search terms.

The initiator and all other petition supporters then have 30 days to gather at least 25000 signatures in total. If they fail to reach that threshold within 30 days, the petition disappears, as Dr Snider experienced. If 25000 people “sign” the petition, the White House promises to post a response.

A WhiteHouse.gov login is required to sign a petition. To get a login, you provide your email address, your name, and, optionally, city, state and zipcode. Each petition signature block includes the first name and last initial, the signature’s order in the overall total, the date the signature was provided, and the city and state of the signer, if provided. For instance:

Chris B
Washington, DC
February 22, 2012
Signature # 1,079

Example: Signature data from the “Rescind” petition

From January 28 through February 10, the Rescind petition gathered 29,127 signatures. The inset below displays the raw data gathered by the page scraping toolset, which can also be downloaded by the link at the bottom of the table.

This animated map shows how the signatures flowed in from January 28 to February 10, normalized by the population of each state.

Fullscreen
The shading of each state shows the number of signatures provided by that state, to date, for each million residents, based on 2010 Census results. States that “boxed above their weight” are shown in darker green; states that were underrepresented, in very light green. Since the figures are cumulative, each state grows somewhat darker over time. Click on the slider at the bottom of the map to show how the signatures accumulated over time.

that the petition took off pretty quickly – two signatures on day one, 32 on day two, 1,386 on day three (reaching all fifty states and DC)

that state participation varied dramatically: Nebraska provided more than 480 signatures per million residents, North Dakota more than 360, while Mississippi provided just 31 signatures per million inhabitants. (Overall, across the US, 127 signatures were provided per million residents, if we assume that all signatures came from the United States.)

4,951 signatures were provided by people who did not state their location — which shows up as NULL in the data.

Next post: How does the signature flow for the “stand strong” petition compare? What surprises do we find when we compare states’ activity on these two opposing petitions? Are these signers as reluctant to provide place information as the Rescind signers?

A postscript for data geeks

Some curiosities:

Each signature is numbered. The same sequence number may appear multiple times on the signatures page, indicating, presumably, two or more different people who signed almost simultaneously. For instance, if the third, fourth, and fifth signers all acted simultaneously, the first six signatures would be numbered 1, 2,3,3,3,6.

One Rescind signer was particularly eager: he signed twice in quick succession, so his name and place show up twice in a row with the same sequence number. This anomaly can’t be tracked by the software currently, leading to a database count of 29,126 signatures, one less than shown on the White House site.

In addition to the “no location” signatures, 28 people provided place information for military post offices or mistyped their place information.

The scraping tool captures the first name and initial of the signer as shown on the petition, but I’ve omitted this column from the download for the moment.

My first four, increasingly accurate approximations to the right answer:
1. Yes.

2. No, if the underlying question is “Can I get the ‘public participation’ checkbox checked off by turning on a Twitter account?” (Not Tim’s underlying question, of course, but some people will read it this way.)

There is a lot of approach/avoidance ambivalence about social media: people see that one can set up an account or a fan page in an afternoon, but they also glimpse, more dimly, that a lot of work is required to make that useful. (Excel will help you estimate a project budget, but it won’t make the process fun or easy.)

3. No, if the real question is “Can I use social media for public involvement and still stay comfortably in control?” See Obama asking for questions via Google Moderator, only to be forced to discuss marijuana legalization . See Digg and the DVD encryption hack issue.

(Of course, social media processes can be shaped.)

4. Yes, once you understand that social media technology is a small part of the overall effort and you’ve rethought how much or little control you need over the whole process.

Bonus points for recognizing that the technology of social media is only the fourth most important concern, after you’ve identified the specific Public you want to involve, your Objectives in involving them, and your Strategy for doing so.

LinkedIn

Subscribe:

Search this website for:

Categories

Responding to 9/11

... we need to be warriors: take our losses, bury our dead, isolate our exposures, repair specific flaws in our systems and stick to our mission plan:
... In America's third century,[ it] has not changed for 228 years: Our God-given purpose is to demonstrate that a varied populace from disparate origins can live peacefully under an open government that governs minimally but humanely.